Barney Frank Quotes

Can anyone even conceive of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank being asked to return for a second day of work at a factory, a farm or anyplace else where verbal nimbleness was of no use?

Former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank once said, “I only voted once for someone who believes in 100 percent of what I believe. And that’s when I voted for myself—the first time.

Barney Frank wanted to know where the Fed was going to get the $85 billion to lend to AIG. I didn’t think this was the time to explain the mechanics of creating bank reserves. I said, “We have $800 billion,” referring to the pre-crisis size of the Fed’s balance sheet. Barney looked stunned. He didn’t see why the Fed should have that kind of money at its disposal.

But the absence of bad motives in no way alleviates the bad effects.

the fabled three horsemen of the fiscal apocalypse—fraud, waste, and abuse

I wish somebody would combine tasers and dildos, and test the devices out on all the politicians in Washington DC. Well, all the politicians except Barney Frank, who’d actually derive pleasure from the experiment.

Southern racists were able to protect murderers only because their legislators exploited fears of centralized power.

They can vote for every possible war that comes along and still be “pro-life,” while a levy that applies only to the vast fortunes left by the richest 1 percent of Americans when a spousal exemption is claimed is the “death tax.

Defending affirmative action gave me the chance to reaffirm my deep commitment to the second of the three questions famously articulated by Rabbi Hillel. My work for LGBT equality represented my answer to his first question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Combating racial prejudice and its lasting effects was my fervent response to his second question: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” But even justly revered sages do not get everything right. Hillel’s third question—“If not now, when?”—can be misleading. The proper reply is “It depends.” That is, it depends on how likely you are to succeed; on whether it will be more helpful to your cause to try and fail, or to hold off for more propitious circumstances; on the impact of settling temporarily for partial success; and on what you can do to improve your chances of ultimate success.

As Representative Barney Frank put it: I believe that we, as the Federal Government, have probably done too little rather than too much to push [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals. . . . The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see . . . the more pressure there is there, then the less I think we see in terms of affordable housing.15

Barney Frank had explained to me how important they were to him and his colleagues,

Starting in the Clinton era and continuing through George W. Bush’s two terms, progressive activists mounted direct pressure—either in the form of public protest or lawsuits—against banks. This was aimed at intimidating banks to adopt new lending standards and also to engage the activist groups themselves in the lending process. In 1994, a young Barack Obama, recently graduated from Harvard Law School, joined two other attorneys in suing Citibank for “discriminatory lending” because it had denied home loans to several bank applicants. The case was called Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. Citibank denied wrongdoing, but as often happens in such situations, it settled the lawsuit to avoid litigation costs and the negative publicity. Selma Buycks-Roberson and two of her fellow plaintiffs altogether received $60,000, and Obama and his fellow lawyers received nearly a million dollars in legal fees. This was a small salvo in a massive fusillade of lawsuits filed against banks and financial institutions in the 1990s. ACORN, the most notorious of these groups, had its own ally in the Clinton administration: Hillary Clinton. (Around the same time, ACORN was also training an aspiring community activist named Barack Obama.) Hillary helped to raise money for ACORN and also for a closely allied group, the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF had been founded by Saul Alinsky and continued to operate as an aggressive leftist pressure group long after Alinsky’s death in 1972. Hillary lent her name to these groups’ projects and met several times with their organizers in the White House. ACORN’s efforts were also supported by progressive politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Jon Corzine, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid. These politicians berated the banks to make loans easier to get. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness,” Frank said at a September 25, 2003, hearing. “I want to roll the dice a little more.

disconnect between people’s distaste for government and their attraction to its manifestations.

Ballplayers do not argue with the umpire so that he’ll change the decision in question. They want to be on his mind when he makes the next one.

But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that “the most important factor” in rising inequality “is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education.” That’s a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I believe very strongly that people on the left are too prone to do things that are emotionally satisfying and not politically useful. I have a rule, and it’s true of Occupy, it’s true of the gay-rights movement: If you care deeply about a cause, and you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends, and political work is much tougher and harder. And I think it’s now clear that it is the disciplined political work that we’ve been able to do that’s won us victories. I am going to write about the history of the LGBT movement partly to make the point that, in America at least, this is the way you do progressive causes.